Katherine L. Holmes

PATINAS

These snowfalls make a metal, monotony

and the great lake
with its eccentric reflections
oxidizes
for one-day-only
the snowcloud to a patina
above the winter-fizz
water in its bottle of malachite ice.

Near the churchstone on the customary

thoroughfare, patina
looking like inlay
grows a sphagnum shimmer

when summer is a hardened memory.

A child keeps curling her hand

at me as if
I was an infant.
Her patina-green headwarmer
rains yarn ripples down
her back, over braids
stubby as mine once were,

veneered in verdigris, like Liberty.

And she is like a stroll
I made through Lake Como's
verdant conservatory

when winter was a stale Wonderbread

and when anything that can happen

is corrodible,
the undergone
making build-ups,
pretty, the patinas

even as the cloud cover
reminds of honeydews and hydrangeas

above the crisp
rind of lake frost

(I said, I feel that way
about honeydew,
because I didn't love
cantaloupe as he did
and other things)

and fantasizes
about ferns

glistening in the sea horse stage.

Katherine L. Holmes's creative work has appeared in The South Dakota Review, Cider Press Review, Phantasmagoria, WordWrights, Marginalia, Minnesota Poetry Calendar, Porcupine, more than 25 print journals. On the internet, she's been published at Amarillo Bay, Avatar, Eclectica, Facets, Fringe, The King’s English, Perigee, Review Americana, Shadowtrain, Word Riot, and others. Her web site is: http://home.earthlink.net/~klouholmes/